The present invention relates to a phoneme recognition apparatus for analyzing utterances of unspecified individuals.
As shown in FIG. 1, a known phoneme recognition apparatus generally comprises a distance calculator 10 which reads reference phoneme patterns from a memory 12 in response to an input feature vector and calculates a Euclidean distance between them. A decision circuit 11 determines the least Euclidean distance and recognizes it as a right phoneme. For example, in a feature space of FIG. 2, reference patterns of phonemes A, B and C are located in areas defined by decision functions 13. Distance calculator 10 determines the Euclidian distances between each of input feature vectors 14 and 15 and reference phonemes A, B and C and recognizes vectors 14 and 15 as phonemes A and B, respectively. However, difficulty arises in the determination whether the feature vector 15 corresponds to reference phoneme B or C if it falls midway between them.